Welcome to benbackx.com
This site is the home base: a place for durable writing, working notes, and ideas that should not depend on whichever feed happens to be paying attention this week.
Why this matters
I wanted one place where my ideas could sit still.
That sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but it matters more than it used to. A post on LinkedIn, X, Medium, Reddit, or any other feed can travel quickly, but it also lives inside someone else’s room. The furniture moves. The door changes. The lighting changes. Sometimes the room gets bought by somebody with a different idea of what attention should be worth.
That is fine for distribution. It is not where I want the canonical copy of my thinking to live.
The IndieWeb community has a useful old idea called POSSE: publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. The point is not to disappear from social platforms. It is to stop confusing the platform with the home.
This site is the home.
Worked example
Some ideas start as rough internal notes. A product lesson from a build. A pattern from wealth-tech work. A thought about personal AI, private data, or why a tool feels wrong even when the feature list is impressive.
Those ideas do not always deserve a polished essay immediately. Sometimes they need a small public note, a few links, and enough structure that I can return to them later without digging through a chat history or a social feed.
That is what I want this site to be good at.
| Platform post | Website post |
|---|---|
| Good for reach and conversation | Good for the durable version |
| Shaped by feed incentives | Shaped by the argument |
| Easy to lose in time | Easy to reference later |
| Often written for reaction | Can be written for clarity |
This is not nostalgia for an older web. Feeds are useful. Social distribution is useful. I read and share plenty through platforms.
But Pew’s 2025 social media news fact sheet is a useful reminder that more and more information is encountered through platform habits and algorithmic environments. That is not automatically bad, but it does mean the surface where people discover an idea is not necessarily the best place for the idea to live.
A feed is a shop window. A website is the workshop.
I want the workshop.
Limitations / not a fit
Not every update belongs here. Some things are too small, too temporary, too private, or too half-baked. Some things should stay as notes. Some should become a private document first. Some should be shared only in conversation.
I also do not want this site to become a performance of productivity: a place where every thought is packaged because publishing activity looks useful from the outside.
The goal is quieter than that.
This site should hold the writing that I may want to point back to: founder notes, product-system thinking, wealth-tech operating lessons, personal data essays, and the occasional rough observation that feels like it might become useful after a little time.
The internet already has enough places optimized for immediacy.
I want this one optimized for returning.